Gentoo 2005.0 Released

mintshows writes "According to Gentoo Planet, the first gentoo release of the year, 2005.0, is out. You can download the 2005.0 ISOs from the torrents at http://torrents.gentoo.org/ . Of course, current Gentoo users can just emerge to the latest and greatest as always."

Comments

Darn it!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just finished compiling 2004.999999!

Re:Darn it!

[KidHash]

Using portage, installing app.version.9999 installs the current CVS build

Re:Darn it!

[amirl]

How is it? Should I upgrade? I'm currently using 2004.999998

compile on!

[qewl]

Has anyone had any experiences with the lengthy compilation having a bad impact on their hard drive? I've long been wondering and considering trying Gentoo. And to those who are very experienced in Gentoo, has all the learning/tweaking/compiling been worth the extra power/costumizability in the end?

Re:compile on!

[lachlan76]

It's not gonna screw with your hard drive, that shouldn't be anything to worry about.

And from my experience, yes, the time I spend compiling stuff is worth it for all the learning and flexibility in the end.

But others may disagree.

Re:compile on!

[Anonymous Coward]

It wont hurt your hard drive, but it might try your patience.

Re:compile on!

[atrader42]

I'd shift those around a bit. The only real liability I've found is the compile time (which can be pretty drastically reduced with the use of some tools. Gentoo has tutorials). I would absolutely move learning and tweaking into the power/cusomizability category (though I haven't found much of a speed improvement over pre-compiled software in most cases, so that probably isn't the best reason to try gentoo). I started out with redhat 9, and although it did what I wanted for the most part, when I had a problem, it was usually pretty hard to fix since I didn't really know what was going on. Now that I've done a couple gentoo installs, though only stage 3, I must admit, I know much better what causes certain problems. In addition, I love being always up-to-date and not having to worry about cruft.

I'm a computer science student, and love learning all I can about computers, so maybe some of those are not advantages for you. However, if you're into experimentation and the latest and greatest, gentoo is a great way to play with it all.

Re:compile on!

[BigBuckHunter]

Why would "compilation" impact a hard drive? It has no more impact than watching lengthy porn videos (normally done during the compilation).

BBH

Re:compile on!

[John Hurliman]

I don't know, I use binary packages for just about everything unless I want the latest bleeding edge stuff or it's just a small trivial package. Gentoo doesn't MAKE you compile everything, it's just the default option.

But to answer your question, I've had a fully compiled system started from stage one, and didn't have any hard drive problems. Also didn't notice any visible performance difference, but the customizability has kept me with Gentoo for a long time now.

Re:compile on!

[mstromb]

Let me say that I'm not a very experienced gentoo user. Not a very experienced linux user either. Oh, I've tried dabbling for the longest time, my interested started long, long ago when I found some RH5 CDs someplace.

Forward to now. Now, I'm building a media center-ish pc. Also acting as a fileserver. Uses wireless, with WPA encryption and all that cool stuff.

Now, I could have gone with some other distro and saved myself quite a bit of time (I'm reinstalling it for the 3rd time as I write this), but honestly, gentoo is just plain fun to set up and I've learned way too much for me to just put it down now.

There are tons of ways to get it started. I've always opted to use a minimal livecd, but bootstrapping from knoppix or another livecd works well too.

Portage is just awesome, the most package-specific setup you'll ever really need to do is edit a new config file. There's even a tool to let you easily merge old config files when new revisions come out. And while I don't know how much speed I'm getting out of compiling everything from source, I do know what's on my computer, as I compulsively check use flags just to see what I can do with my system. With portage, I've found incredibly useful software I never knew existed, and don't know how I lived without. It's all about choices, choices, choices. And the only penalty for changing your mind is a bit of your time.

My only bad experiences stem from me using insane compiler flags that mess up your system completely. I had no idea it was possible to screw up rm, but I managed to do it. My hardware is also not the best, I went for cheap and older components I had lying around. However, gentoo hasn't told me "no" yet, I've just needed to be clever about doing things, which has taught me a huge amount about how linux, and computers in general, work. I've always been the "computer guy" around here, but I just feel... closer ;)

So long story short, I think gentoo is really, really worth it if you've got some spare time and some curiosity.

And being able to use bleeding-edge everything is just cool.

Re:compile on!

[TexVex]

Are you just being silly? Think about a TiVo, which records video real-time continuously while powered on. DirecTiVo systems can and do record two video streams at times, while playing back a third. All using regular old IDE hard drives.

Compiling some software for a few hours is a drop in the bucket.

Re:compile on!

[pyite]

And from my experience, yes, the time I spend compiling stuff is worth it for all the learning and flexibility in the end.

Yea, it starts out that way, like six years ago when I was grabbing the GIMP from CVS on a regular basis just for fun. Then you discover Debian and recover your time, realizing that except for special cases, compiling yourself isn't worth it.

Re:compile on!

[Jafar00]

If you compile Gentoo on a slower system (PII, PIII etc) you will notice a huge increase in performance over a pre-packaged system. I have a PII-366 laptop that could not play movies until I installed Gentoo on it. Sure, it took 4 days to get everything installed, but in the end the old laptop is now quite usable with a cutting edge, new OS rather than just opting for the recommended win98 ;)

Re:compile on!

[ThJ]

I agree very strongly with this. Although I'm a geek, that doesn't mean things *have* to be as complicated as possible.

Re:compile on!

[dmayle]

has all the learning/tweaking/compiling been worth the extra power/costumizability in the end

I'm an avid Gentoo user, and I've got to say, if you're only considering Gentoo for the speed/power, you might as well put some stickers on your case, because you'll probably notice a bigger speed improvement like that. Gentoo is really useful for the following reason:

• Relatively bare-bones linux (like Linux from Scratch) but with excellent documentation. - Fantastic for learing about linux
• Customizability - if your distro maintainers chose one route with a package that doesn't meet your needs, your stuck installing from source, and maintaining version upgrades yourself. (Being sure to keep track of config options every time) - with Gentoo, you set the appropiate config option (called USE-flags) and you're good from then on.
• Support community - no matter who you are, sometimes you will have problems. Pretty much every problem I've ever had on Linux took a simple search on the Gentoo forums to find the solution in less than five minutes. (Even when my problems aren't on Gentoo Linux, I always search the Gentoo forums first, as they're usually more likely to contain a useful answer)
• Available packages - Everything under the sun (and I mean, just about everything you could want) is already packaged for Gentoo. Meaning, unlike with some other distros, you won't have to go searching for someone else's packages to install what you want. It's already there, with just one line to search and install.
• Support community - oh wait, did I mention this already? It deserves a second mention because it really is fantastic. I've never been more impressed with the amount of community help available.

Re:compile on!

[iamacat]

In my experience, there is much more learning/tweaking on redhat side than for gentoo. For example, to install kde 3.2, just type "emerge kde". With a pre-packaged Linux distribution you would have to worry about installing countless packages missing or out of date on your system. Later you get to fix everything that broke because you upgraded its dependency to an incompatible version

With that said, the install process has several steps with no apparent purpose except for being 1337. They didn't really have to make you install cron, syslog and dhcpd, or make you deal with fstab or grub.conf.

The real problem though is configuring the kernel. Building a custom kernel is a very good idea, because you don't want your notebook to autodetect drivers for several minutes when booting, or to waste CPU cycles on compiled-in SMP support or multi-homed webserver. But Linux configuration screens are insane. Do I need an "HPET timer"? Who the hell knows?

I think the solution is to make Linux kernel modular, with drivers and subsystems that can be downloaded and compiled separately. Then we can start with a minimum kernel and emerge, say, quota support in the same way as kde.

Re:compile on!

[atrader42]

That was only true for me as far as official redhat packages went. As soon as I started looking for packages that weren't from Redhat (ie XMMS that plays mp3s, proprietary ati drivers), I was at the mercy of the various rpm repositories and my machine got ugly pretty quickly. Certainly this has gotten much better with Fedora and yum/apt-get, but, as I said, it's not just about having the same packages if you don't have a good idea of where your problem is or some reasonable steps to take in order to solve it.

As an aside, the best computer support I've ever had for any problem has come from the gentoo forums. I think there's an atmosphere that everyone is learning and so should be helping each other along.

Re:compile on!

[hdparm]

No issues with HD. And don't worry, here is the quick howto, it's pretty straight forward.

Re:compile on!

[Feztaa]

Though I agree that you can get better support for something well-tested like a commercial distro, there is something to be said for building a distro from scratch, if your goal is to learn how the system works.

Personally, I think everybody should build LFS at least once (at least everybody who wants to learn how linux works anyway). Gentoo makes it too easy, you don't learn nothin' ;)

Re:compile on!

[vadim_t]

Quite improbable.

In case you've never taken a hard disk apart, the heads aren't moved by a motor. They're moved by a voice coil, which is basically a coil of wire that interacts with a permanent magnet attached to the drive. They don't touch each other. Here's a picture

Now, I suppose that the bearings could wear out, but compiling software isn't very likely to make a lot of difference. Especially since it's not such a disk intensive operation anyway.

Re:compile on!

[amcguinn]

To my mind, the big advantage is that the dependencies are more fuzzy. I can run a stable distribution, with stable, tested, software, but if I need, say, the latest Abiword, or mplayer, I don't need to upgrade my whole system to get it. That is what I always wanted with Debian, but couldn't have.

The end result is just slightly less stable than debian "stable", but considerably more than "testing" or "unstable". It is only possible because my packages are built against the libraries I've got, not the ones the package maintainer has got. Waiting for compiles is a pain, but it's what makes it all work.

Re:compile on!

[BenjyD]

For example, to install kde 3.2, just type "emerge kde"

I'm not sure what you're saying: how is that different from:

• apt-get install kde
• pacman -S kde
• yum install kde

Re:compile on!

[ben_rh]

I have a PII-366 laptop that could not play movies until I installed Gentoo on it.

I don't understand how this myth continues to propogate. There are no end of benchmarks all over the net that show beyond any doubt that -march=pentium4, -fomit-frame-pointer and -omg-optimised don't have an appreciable impact on performance.

Sensible compiling employs the old faithful -O2 (or -Os to optimise for binary size if you must). This flag enables all optimisations that are considered stable and suitable for general use. Enabling all the 'leet' options has such a small effect (in the realm of 2%), and with some codebase / architecture combinations, it actually causes a slowdown.

The current operating state (system load, disk activity etc) has a far greater effect on the speed of execution of any application.

So, since -totally-go-fast and friends are gratuitous and have negligible effect on the overall speed of the system, the compiling can either be done once by the package maintainer, or ten thousand times by hackers all around the world. Why not let the maintainer do it, and save yourself the time and trouble? It's a much more efficient setup.

I used to run Gentoo myself, and quite liked parts of it (e.g. the nice clean init script setup). But seriously,

• A significant emerge world: two hours
• A significant apt-get update, apt-get upgrade: ~ 1 minute (the biggest I've ever seen took around 5)

There's not much of a decision to make as far as I'm concerned.

And don't even get me started on the people that insist on writing -O8 or something like it. A quick RTFM would reveal that options above -O3 don't actually have any impact anyway. In fact, the relevant code within gcc is something like

if (opt_level > 3)
opt_level = 3;

Can't argue with cold hard C. ;)

Re:compile on!

[vasqzr]

Customizability, Support, Available packages...

Linux, defined.

Re:compile on!

[4of12]

It takes a relatively low admin (person) time and a high computer time to keep it up to date which is much better than systems that need a medium part of my own time.

From what I understand, though, the low marginal costs of maintaining a Gentoo system are offset by the high initial cost in learning how things work, setting things up, etc. compared to other distributions.

I'm inclined to try Gentoo one of these days when I get several days free to do this, till then I'll limp along with Fedora Core and yum.

Re:compile on!

[Binestar]

Why not let the maintainer do it, and save yourself the time and trouble? It's a much more efficient setup.

2 words: USE flags. USE flags affect the ./configure script to enable or disable features. Have a program that likes to be compiled against GPM, but you are never at a console or your machine doesn't have a mouse? -gpm in the use flags and your software will never compile in support for gpm. There are dozens of examples, and while optimizations in gcc don't do much, library support *IS* useful for both keeping out what you don't want/need and for making sure you have what you do want and need.

For the record: My USE flags are:

USE="-3dfx 3dnow X acpi aim apache2 -apm arts bash-completion bzlib cdr cdparanoia -cjk crypt dvd dvdread -emacs -emacs-w3 encode ftp -gnome java kde mbox -maildir mime mmx mozilla mp3 mpeg mysql ogg oggvorbis oscar perl png qt samba ssl vcd -voodoo3 -xinerama xmms sse"

And my cflags are: -mcpu=athlon-xp -O3 -pipe. As you can see, my USE flags are much more specific than my CFLAGS. Have you ever tried portage? It is the reason I switched to gentoo in the first place.

Re:compile on!

[kesuki]

-march=pentium4
Apples to oranges... He's talking a pentium-2 which is a glorfied Pentium MMX reneamed as 'pentium 2' and give some higher clockspeeds. the difference for a Pentium 4 user is going to be negligable. However, for users of slower processors, there is a hell of a lot of performance tweaking that can be done, that many distros completely ignore. a lot of code has been added to make programs run better and faster on MMX2 and MMX3 cpus like the Pentium-4 all that codebase, slows the program down greatly when running on a legacy MMX CPU. So in short, there is a ton that gentoo maintainers can do to make their system run cleaner and faster ona pentium 2, and all resulting binaries will run tragically slower on a pentium 4. (some over 200% slower) so you see, it's not something that 'mainstream' distros can do easily without forking a whole Pentium MMX version, while all gentoo has to do is set some options because it detected you have a pentium-2. I realize there are other distros that specilize in older hardware too, but not everyone has a pentium 4 class cpu.
Myself, I have an athlon XP, and gentoo might run faster, and certaintly would be easier to keep programs up to date with, but the compile time isn't worth it to me, binaries download much faster.. although nowhere near the 5 minutes you're talking about I've got 3 mbit cable service, and installing from the net-install disc took about 2 hrs all told. (including reboots etc) compiling an entire os would have taken me more along the line of 4 hours plus (I have a lot of games installed)

Re:compile on!

[drinkypoo]

Setting things up is a breeze. You won't find any config files outside of /etc (usually in /etc/packagename) except for the ones in /etc/conf.d that specify startup flags and the like. Gentoo is very consistent, much moreso than most other distributions, even if you don't like the way it does everything. On a fairly fast machine with plenty of memory it only takes a couple days to build gentoo with KDE and Gnome, honestly. Even on a slow machine it shouldn't take more than a week and most of that time you can be doing something else :)

Honestly, the gentoo base installation goes very quick. I suggest starting from a stage3 install, as you can actually be using the system while you upgrade it. Install the portage tree from the CD and don't upgrade it until after you install binary packages from the packages CD. Then emerge --sync to update portage, emerge -u portage to update portage, then emerge -uD world to update the entire system. I think the single thing that takes the longest is probably either building gcc, or X.org. Everything else is relatively short.

Re:compile on!

[drinkypoo]

I don't think that emerge is the only system with dependency resolution. I think that emerge is the only system (well, alongside BSD systems) that has the dependency solution. Granted, some people are not willing to compile all the time. They would rather their computer sat idle, or their computer is genuinely too busy. For those people, there are binary distributions. Fine by me.

That's what I like about Gentoo...

[lachlan76]

...rather than have 'releases', there's just a whole lot of software which can be used in any combination from the get-go.

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[Zork the Almighty]

That's fine for a dedicated machine, but for a general purpose desktop it's a nightmare. I honestly think Gentoo is best suited to hobbyists.

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[Trejkaz]

Actually, it's far from a nightmare on the desktop. I got sick of a few other distros mostly because of their philosophy of reinstalling every new minor release.

On Gentoo, you don't even upgrade from release to release, you just install stuff when you can be bothered and one day you find yourself on 2005.0 accidentally. Since I did my last world upgrade a day after KDE 3.4 came out, I'm probably pretty up to date by chance.

Well, I guess there is a slight difference between the releases, though. The later profiles will specify more modern default packages than the earlier ones. That doesn't have too much effect once your system is already installed, however.

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[Bitsy Boffin]

On Gentoo, you don't even upgrade from release to release, you just install stuff when you can be bothered and one day you find yourself on 2005.0 accidentally.


With Debian...

apt-get install packageyouwanttoupgrade

no fuss, no muss, gets what is needed no more no less.

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[richie2000]

apt-get install packageyouwanttoupgrade

emerge packageyouwanttoupgrade

So Gentoo saves wear and tear on your keyboard. Hooray! :-)

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[hpxchan]

Everything is up-to-date, and re-installs are rarely - if ever - necessary. Fedora Core users must wait for FC4 for KDE 3.4 and Gnome 2.10; Gentoo users just have to wait for the rsync update.

If (like me) you're runnning a personal computer (i.e. not a production server) and want the latest and greatest as soon as they come out, Gentoo is worth it.

Chandler

Bye bye Gentoo users!

[Anonymous Coward]

Have fun compiling! See you when 2006.0 comes out!

Re:Bye bye Gentoo users!

[mu-sly]

Bye bye Gentoo users? Sheesh, we don't even need stop using things while they upgrade. Just emerge and forget about it while carrying on as normal.

All this hot air about learning stuff from Gentoo is partly true, but the main reason I use it is because it's stupidly easy to maintain and keep up to date. Compiling certain things takes a while, and I don't bother to compile OpenOffice because it's not worth it. Still, it's not like I even have to stop using the computer while it's going on - I just fire, forget, and get on with my work.

Gentoo users need to do more

[BigBuckHunter]

Don't current Gentoo users have to change the symlink of their /etc/make.profile to point to the 2005.0 profile under /usr/portage/profiles? Then emerge sync, then emerge -uD world? Then fix_libtool_dependancies.sh... Then revdep-rebuild... Then Emerge --prune some of the old slotted apps that they don't need anymore?


Sincerely Yours
An "Actual" Gentoo user.

Re:Gentoo users need to do more

[Stalyn]

please check here.

just sub 2004.3 for 2005.0.

Re:Gentoo users need to do more

[Mornelithe]

Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt your masturbation.

Your joke was very funny. You should be a stand-up comedian.

Re:Gentoo liveCD?

[lachlan76]

Uhhh...what?

Gentoo is already on a livecd, which you boot from. Then you chroot into your hard drive for the install. Is that sort of what you meant?

New but better?

[jefedesign]

I have given Gentoo several attempts and have floundered each time because of hardware issues. It would be nice to have a distro that recognized all my hardware with minimal configuration. Gentoo is still a little scary for my Mepis oriented thinking.

Re:New but better?

[grishnav]

Ubuntu is really great like that. It's what I use when I don't have the time/motivation to do a Gentoo install (and then normally just wish I'd done the gentoo install when I can't have Gaim+OTR, mplayer+codecs, etc. without grabbing the tgz's, hunting down the deps, and putting it all together myself instead of just 'emerge gaim-otr', 'emerge mplayer'... oh well).

Anyway, Ubuntu has up to date packages, uses a nice interface to apt, and has really excellent hardware detection. It's as brainless to install as Windows and just about as easy to use. I like it much.

Re:New but better?

[traskjd]

Yeah - Windows is great for that - you should try it sometime :-)

- JD

P.S. Begin the countdown to being marked a troll :-D

For those of you who want ease of install

[vectorian798]

Try this out:
Vidalinux

Apparently it's Gentoo, with a nice graphical installer that is no longer cruel and unusual punishment...although the install of Gentoo teaches you quite a bit.

Yes, you get the benefits of portage.

Just wait a little for a new version based on 2005

Re:For those of you who want ease of install

[jay-be-em]

What exactly does it teach you?

How to watch endless output from gcc?

If you want to learn *nix read a few books, including the Stevens programming books.

Installing gentoo isn't going to make you any more knowledgable about *nix.

Oh, and I just

[Anonymous Coward]

No, really, I didn't just finish compiling whatever. Anyway, as a lot of people still don't seem to understand, release don't mean anything if you've got gentoo allready installed, as you can keep it up to date with emerge sync and emerge -u world, that's all there is to it.

Releases only mean something for people wanting to install gentoo, although it is no proplem to install from an older medium, you'll still get an uptodate system in the end.

However, what is great about new releases is that they mean new and uptodate binary packages, so if you just want to install gentoo quickly and still have an uptodate system, here is your chance.

Btw., wasn't this release supposed to feature at least a preview of the upcoming installer? Any word on that?

Re:Gentoo liveCD = Catalyst

[yamcha666]

The Gentoo people are already ahead of you.

The software is called Catalyst. More info here.

Re:KDE 3.4

[Jafar00]

3.4 is there but masked. The current stable version according to portage is 3.3.2. I'm sure in a few weeks, I will wake up to a new KDE and a smoking CPU after all that compiling. Funny thing is, I use Xfce these days. ;)

just about through with gentoo

[SuperBanana]

Pardon a little rant, but gentoo is about to get wiped off all my remaining linux boxen. I've already taken the hard drive out of the gateway and popped in m0n0wall, a CD-based firewall that is the bee's knees and works much more smoothly. Thank god I don't have to deal with the monstrosity that is the webmin "user interface"(aka 5 billion gif images for no particular reason). Oh if only it supported config-on-usb-key!

Last night I updated apache and a bunch of other things (I use the unstable branch because "stable" lags, big time, on many packages I need; yes, I can manually unmask those certain packages, but that wouldn't have solved the particular problem I'm about to describe).

I run etc-update, which absolutely blows chunks and has for years; for example, ALL of /etc is protected. So maybe webmin comes along and touches 70 config files. You're then treated to trying to approve those 70 files along with other files that were also changed by other emerge updates. Attempts to provide better alternatives have been staunchly blocked; cfg-update has been trying to get into portage, but the gentoo team have been sitting on their asses for over two years. Piss-poor configuration management is one sure fire way to get me off your distro, because it's the biggest potential problem maker. PS- not everyone installs X on their servers, guys.

All is well, or so I think. Overnight, the power fails. I go to show someone photos on the server, connection refused. Huh?

Apache's not running. Hmm. 'apache2 start'.

That spits out a big tirade about how my commonapache2.conf file "is present in the old location" and I need to update the current configuration files and remove the commmonapache2.conf file. Then tells me to see this page which tells me about all the internal details, none of which I give a fuck about; I want a simple 1-2-3 migration, and they're yacking about recompiling everything, but they don't actually tell you what versions of everything you need to have at a minimum for that package to "understand" their changes. The page claims mod_php isn't ready for these changes yet (which is not true anymore, I later discover), so I panic and try going back to older versions of everything. More carnage and wasted time compiling.

It then takes me 2 hours to sort out the mess because they've got HARD LINKS to some directories, soft links to others, there's a full configuration file tree in /usr/lib/apache2, there's no clear delineation between the "common" and (???) apache conf files, their migration page claims the server root changed to /usr/lib/apache2 but it really didn't, it's all still in /etc/apache2/...Oh, mod_user_dir for no particular good reason now has to be TURNED ON with a -D option. I spend another 30 minutes fixing all the crap that was in my old apache configuration files, because apache2's error messages consist of "an access directive prohibited you from loading that". WHAT access directive? Or, my personal favorite, an "internal server error". Whee.

It's a unholy mess (at least part of it is apache's fault, for having one of the worst configuration schemes and error handling I've ever dealt with) and I was completely caught off guard- why? Because as portage merges things, if there are extremely important notes printed to the console, but so is EVERY detail about a compile along with all the files that are being merged/unmerged/whatevered...so chances are, it scrolls right out of the terminal buffer. At the end of a multiple-package emerge, there's no one block of text that says "IMPORTANT STUFF CHANGED".

I used to think the compile-from-source stuff was a godsend, but lately, it's nothing but a curse. I run a sync and then emerge -up world, and I get a list 3 pages long of mostly minor little version bumps. Fantasti

Re:just about through with gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo has no "unstable" branch in the sense you present it here. You can choose to install software marked as unstable (in the opinion of the individual ebuild maintainers). You claim to say you understand this concept, but you mix up the ideas of unstable and unmasked packages.

dispatch-conf is the sensible alternative to etc-update - check it out (it's been around for a long time now).

Gentoo is, and always has been, billed as a distro for advanced users with time to maintain it.

You are using the wrong tool for the job - SuSE or Debian, or even *BSD seems more appropiate for what you require.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[R.Caley]

I run a sync and then emerge -up world, and I get a list 3 pages long of mostly minor little version bumps.

Surely, if you want to run an `unstable' system, you are going to have to expect things to constantly change.

On the apache front, for real systems (as opposed to random desktops I happen to want a web server on to run SWAT or something), I build apache myself. That way FreeBSD and RedHat servers have everything working the same way. Apache is so easy to build, and so portable, that the ports/packages/rpms/whatever of each specific system don't buy you much. A trivial shell script contianing the call to configure you decide on is effectively a cross-platform package.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[joaobranco]

So, you want your cake and eat it too?

Sorry, can't be done.

I run gentoo in one machine I have. I however don't run it with ~arch make flags on (you call it unstable).

But I also run a handful of servers. They don't run gentoo, but run FreeBSD (close enough). Again, on the servers I need to have running smoothly I use FreeBSD STABLE, not CURRENT.
In fact, I only run CURRENT on my personal notebook, which I can afford to tinker with when I like it (and that on dual boot, so I can always access my data when I need it)

If you want stability, and ease of configuration, don't use an unstable version of any system thats being changed every day. Even if tools can be found to help management in this situation, you are trying to build a castle in the sand... It will come down, rest assured.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[Gord]

> I run a sync and then emerge -up world

Why? I will never undertand why Gentoo users persist in running an 'emerge -up world' to upgrade all their packages in one go, then wonder why they've got a nightmare of configuration changes to work through.

The only reason to upgrade a package should be that there is something wrong with it such as a security vulnerability or you need functionality from the new version.

If you want to upgrade Apache, then you should do just that, upgrade Apache. It will pull in any updated dependancies it needs, usually just a few or none, then upgrade Apache. This gives you the chance to read through any messages regarding the configuration files and a chance to make these changes, restart the webserver and check everything is working okay, before moving on an upgrading anything else.

Updating 70 odd packages just because there are newer versions out is just asking for trouble.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[drinkypoo]

It is really annoying that you have to be compiling constantly when you use gentoo, but it's not annoying that it actually works and I can just make my own installer CD with a miniroot that has busybox and some filesystem utilities in it, and unpack a tarball into place. Bingo, I'm installed. I chroot into it, build whatever I need to get the system going, install grub to the boot partition, and bingo. I'm in like Flynn. On the other hand, I continually have problems getting other Linux distributions to install, even on completely ordinary hardware. I've had problems on very boring systems (that the gentoo LiveCD figured out completely) with Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, and Slackware. Gentoo generally just works, and it's very easy to figure out how to make my own installer CD if theirs doesn't support my particular hardware. (mkisofs is your friend. you will need a current version of grub if you want to use it, because it supports el torito boot.) I just build whatever kernel I need on another system and I'm done. You could get there with colinux if you had to.

If I were a noob I'd probably be trying to run fedora, but I'm not even going to get involved there. If I can't get white box linux to work on a mailserver box at work, then I'm going to put gentoo there, too. It had SuSE enterprise 8 which actually required an update to 8.1 or 8.01 or something in order to support a megaraid card in a gateway server. I tried doing it with debian, but debian didn't want to read its driver floppies.

I'm pretty well disgusted with every distribution other than gentoo. It features the best part of BSD, namely ports, in a linux-friendly form. Some of the package maintainers are definitely crack smokers, but in general the system works very well. In particular portage itself needs help, especially so that it can recover from problems. If even the cached information is somehow corrupted, even though portage can tell it's corrupted, it won't rebuild it properly. In general some of the most important parts of gentoo, like portage in fact, are poorly documented. Don't even look at the documentation for the installer LiveCD creation tool, it's maybe five percent of what it should be, and even most gentoo developers reportedly don't understand it. Otherwise I've been as pleased with gentoo as possible.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[archen]

shouldn't you be running RELEASE on servers? (Just nitpicking) =)

They don't run gentoo, but run FreeBSD (close enough).

Actually I think you sort of get off track there. Gentoo and FreeBSD are similar but very different in the way they operate. The FreeBSD base (for most people) operates on a tested release schedule. FreeBSD CURRENT lets you live closer to the edge than any other Linux distro ever does, which is why it's sort of crazy to use IMO. But FreeBSD has the base system, and allows you access to software with ports. They are too separate entities. Gentoo being Linux uses portage to update everything including the kernel. FreeBSD doesn't have an unstable version of ports, although you can use bleeding edge versions of some of them.

To me Free/Net BSD is sort of like having your cake and eating it too. A stable base operating system, and software that is kept up to date.

Re:KDE 3.4

[aconbere]

honestly XFCE 4.2 is one the nicest, cleanest and most stable Window Manager/ Desktop Environments I've found and I've tried them all. It's crisp clean and simple, doesn't come with a whole slew of deps (ie no ancient mozilla dependancies that I'm never going to use).

then to top it off, it has taken a clue from the *box's and the like and made using workspaces more than just an eye-candy toy, making it easy to scroll through workspaces, or to set keys to do so. It doesn't steal key configs as gnome does (F1?). and last but not least it's FAST.

Anders

fragmented fs

[cryptoluddite]

The only real problem I've had with gentoo is fragmentation caused by all the compiling and updating files. I think it isn't so much that the files are fragmented as spread out thin across the disk... that's because you're always compiling something and creating system files with different amounts of space in use.

I've tried different filesystems such as jfs, reiser4 (using -mm kernel), and ext3 of course and none of them really solved the problem. Reiser4 is the best overall, but suffers from several-second long pauses when doing file-io as in rebalances the tree, which can be really irritating when :wq from vi hangs for a while. The best solution I have found is to create a fairly large partition and mount tmpfs onto /tmp then bind to /usr/tmp and optionally to /usr/portage/distfiles or portage cache dir. Creating a loopback device file and putting portage on it helps but the real problem IMO is all the files from compiling. Over time this has a large impact.

Other that that gentoo is awesome. I always have more up-to-date software than any other distro, it's simple to set options for various software, and there's never any version conflicts. The only thing that ever takes any time from an administration POV is etc-update. Once you figure out the interactive merge and what files to actually care about (/etc/conf.d and /etc/fstab|rc.conf|make.conf) it goes pretty smooth, although it defitely needs some work on that part.

Re:fragmented fs

[bonch]

I always have more up-to-date software than any other distro, it's simple to set options for various software, and there's never any version conflicts.

And people wonder why Gentoo users are stereotyped? All three of those statements aren't always true.

1.) So, where's your Gnome 2.10 then? Before anybody mentions ~x86, that's no different from unstable on Debian or just installing the package yourself on any other distro.

2.) There are sometimes configuration issues with Gentoo; they are mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. For instance, etc-update absolutely sucks and the Gentoo devs refuse to replace it with better solutions that have already been offered.

3.) Gentoo's packaging system sometimes creates versioning conflicts. I've personally had to fix a broken system twice. Check the Gentoo forums for all the other issues users sometimes have.

I'm not bashing people who use Gentoo. I'm just saying, it's not some perfect distro that does everything great. And compilation is so overrated and provides no benefits. I wiped my three year old Gentoo install once I discovered Ubuntu, so that's just me.

Re:fragmented fs

[szap]

The only real problem I've had with gentoo is fragmentation

You might want to look into XFS, particularly xfs_fsr ("filesystem reorganizer for XFS" from the xfsdump package in most distros). Works on mounted filesystems.

Higher CPU and mem usage than other fs, though. YMMV.

Re:fragmented fs

[Lussarn]

I wiped my three year old Gentoo install once I discovered Ubuntu

And thats the bigest strengths of gentoo. While other distros "can" function three years from initiall install without distribution upgrades Gentoo has this one nailed down. A three year old install function very close to a newly installed machine. For desktop use thats just wonders.

Re:fragmented fs

[Mornelithe]

1.) So, where's your Gnome 2.10 then? Before anybody mentions ~x86, that's no different from unstable on Debian or just installing the package yourself on any other distro.

I doubt that it's easier to track down packages outside of a repository---in addition to any dependencies they may have---than it is to unmask the ~x86 Gnome builds in Gentoo and have dependencies resolved for you.

I don't know anything about Debian, so I can't comment on it. Is it possible to install only Gnome 2.10 from unstable, and have everything else from stabe/testing (I assume it is, but I thought I'd ask)?

2.) There are sometimes configuration issues with Gentoo; they are mentioned elsewhere in this discussion.

There are sometimes configuration issues with Mac OS X, and every other large software system on earth.

For instance, etc-update absolutely sucks and the Gentoo devs refuse to replace it with better solutions that have already been offered.

Portage has come with dispatch-conf for a while now, although it requires some setting up, so it's probably less used/advertised than etc-update.

3.) Gentoo's packaging system sometimes creates versioning conflicts. I've personally had to fix a broken system twice. Check the Gentoo forums for all the other issues users sometimes have.

Yes, sometimes there are version conflicts in Portage, just as there in every operating system. Perhaps the grandparent was saying that in his experience, there are fewer version conflicts than with other systems he's used. Or that he hasn't encountered any, even though some obviously exist at times, since anything else is nearly impossible. Sometimes people use hyperbole in everyday situations, and not everything they say is meant to be taken exactly literally.

compilation is so overrated

This is true.

and provides no benefits.

This is untrue. I quite enjoy my ability to install mplayer without installing directfb, gtk 1.2, esound, JACK, and other things I'll never use, while other people have an easy way to install mplayer so that it can make use of all those things.

Ubuntu is nice, and maybe when I buy my next computer, I'll use it (or, Kubuntu, rather) instead of Gentoo. However, Gentoo does have advantages over Ubuntu (and vice versa) depending on who you are.

Re:fragmented fs

[brunes69]

Seeing how Portage's temp location where it extracts it's archives and does all its compiling is /var/tmp, I would think that would be the key area to optimize, not /tmp. Portage doesn't use /tmp for anything important.

Re:fragmented fs

[tweakt]

"The only thing that ever takes any time from an administration POV is etc-update."

Then you'll be pleased to discover 'dispatch-conf' It keeps all your CONFIG_PROTECT files in RCS revision control and automatically merges in changes which do not result in conflicts (not by default, auto-merge must be enabled, but it works flawlessly). You'll only be prompted when there are changes to config files in updates that directly conflict with changes that you've made yourself.

Re:fragmented fs

[Oopsz]

dispatch-conf has one feature i've yet to see in any other conf manager or editor. Saved, revisioned histories. That alone is worth it's use..

Calm down

[Anonymous Coward]

First off, I agree with some of the things you say, while I personally don't find etc-update to be that hard (It just gives you a list of the config files that can be updated and you can then simply choose the ones you don't want to be updated, that is most of the times the ones you edited yourself and then update the rest automatically), it sure isn't the ideal way of doing things.

Also the important messages scrolling by has been a problem for ages and still hasn't been addressed, which is a shame.

And I also agree that gentoo's handling of web things like apache, php, wordpress, etc. is far from ideal. (webapp-config, how I hate you).

But there is one thing that really makes a lot of your critizism mute, you are running an unstable system and complain about breakage and constant updates. Come on, that's just silly.

And contrary to what you seem to think, there is no situation that requires you to run an unstable system, especially if this system is a server. If you think you need some unstable apps, fine, gentoo gives you the tools to just install those unstable apps and leave everything else stable, if you refuse to use these tools, don't complain, it is entirely your fault.

add this to /etc/portage/package.keywords

[rkcallaghan]

paste this block in to your /etc/portage/package.keywords to get KDE 3.4.0

# unmasking kde 3.4.0
=kde-base/kde-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdeartwork-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdebase-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/arts-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdebase-pam-4 ~x86
=kde-base/kdelibs-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdegames-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdepim-3.4.0-r1 ~x86
=kde-base/kdewebdev-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdegraphics-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdenetwork-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdetoys-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdeadmin-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdemultimedia-3.4.0 ~x86
>=media-libs/xine-lib-1.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdeaddons-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdeedu-3.4.0 ~x86
>=dev-libs/boost-1.32 ~x86
=kde-base/kdeutils-3.4.0 ~x86

Re:Gnome 2.10?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus, Gnome 2.10 has been available for quite some time now. It's just masked, that is all.

So if you want it, unmask it (should be 2 minutes or work) and install it, but let the people that want to have a stable system have their stable system.

Broken system?

[Billly Gates]

I did an emerge --sync and an emerge -u world just a few hours ago.

I wonder if this new release is why autoconf became broken and why I can't compile anything,

The whole "learning" thing

[bonch]

I used to be a Gentoo guy after rolling my own LFS install. A lot of people go on and on about how Gentoo "teaches" them about Linux due to the install process, but what exactly are you learning? At most, you learn how to partition correctly. Everything else is handled with automated scripts that you just set flags for if you want to customize. When you install packages, you just emerge it, and it does all the compilation for you. So what exactly is being taught here? Just curious.

For a real good time, Linux From Scratch will actually give you insight into what's going on. No automated scripts there (though there are some available for LFS veterans who don't want to do it all again).

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[Lacraia]

I'm a Gentoo user. I don't use Gentoo primary to learn things. Of course you do learn some stuff if you get your hands dirty, but that's true for all distributions. The advantage of Gentoo is compilation for a particular machine, but doing it the easy-peasy way.

Learning things I did when I failed a Linux from Scratch installtion three times.

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[shutdown -p now]

Learning to tinker with config files on your own. Distros such as Fedora or SuSE usually provide their own GUI configurators, which, while not stopping you from hand-editing configs, discourage such activity. Debian is much better (or worse?) in that aspect, but even there most packages, once installed, are configured using a simple ncurses-based program which asks you a few questions and writes the config. In Gentoo, you don't have such options, and have to go read the manual and then edit the config yourself. It definitely does help to learn how to do that.

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[MyDixieWrecked]

it's kinda closer to learning at your own pace.

Sure, everything's handled by automated scripts, but there's still a lot of learning that's going on. You manually set a lot of information that's not there by default (hostname, dnsdomainname, etc) and manually set your internet settings in config files. I know in some X-based distros, there's GUI wizards for all that stuff.

Also, installing gentoo gives you a feel for all the things in the kernel. You can see "holy crap, I can compile in support for this Wacom tablet?!" where as if you install RedHat or whatever, you may not be able to even get the thing working. ...not that I've ever even tried to get my wacom tablet working in linux... just that I noticed there's support for it in the kernel...

also, the thing I like most about Gentoo isn't that everything's compiled for my machine specifically, even though that is nice, but rather the fact that a base Gentoo install is barebones. There's nothing. No ftp command, no hostx. Just the essentials. If I'm putting together a machine that's just going to be an FTP/rsync server, why do I need all that other crap that comes in a standard install?

I've never used Debian. Just Mandrake, Gentoo, Yellowdog, LinuxPPC, and RedHat, and yeah, I know you can tell it to do a minimal install, but Gentoo's installation handbook is taylored to people installing a minimal base system and just gets them started.

Gentoo's learning experience is 'learning by immersion.' Much like moving to Japan to learn japanese, you learn simply by being up to yer neck in the whole thing.

GUI installer - not this time around

[nighty5]

I'm a big fan of Gentoo, I run it on my laptop and my file server, its a shame that the GUI installer didnt make it into this build...

Although the console install process certainly teaches new users of linux new tricks it might help gain some traction into the linux market to help raise awareness of the project.

Hopefully the next build will make it :)

Good work guys!

Re:Fresh gentoo, old debian

[EzInKy]

Gentoo seems is always fresh, while my Debian is somewhat old ... Despite compiling time, i would have been using Gentoo instead of debian for 1~ year.

You know I've been running Gentoo since '92 with "~arch" in my make.conf as my main distro while keeping a Debian unstable partition around for the occasional portage borkings and I must say you are so totally wrong. Anyone who uses Sid and a handful of unofficial repositories will be almost as current as Gentoo "~arch".

That said though, I do still prefer compiling free software from scratch and Gentoo is the natural choice. As far as all the compile time jokes most smaller packages don't take much longer on a fast processor to emerge than to apt-get a binary. Large ones like KDE are another story but then again your system is still usable while they build in the background.

How Ironic

[Ctrl Alt De1337]

It's always ironic to me wherever Gentoo is discussed on Slashdot because Gentoo has struck me as the ultimate RTFM distribution. Think about that for a second. RTFM required + Slashdot = ...

I don't know why I hadn't thought of this before

[blonde rser]

Does anybody else think that the combination of torrent and emerge (or torrent and apt-get for that matter) would be a great match? I mean transfers are pretty quick already but this way the bandwidth loads from updates can be passed around with out a serious security risk. Bah I'm probably just being an idiot.

Thanks to the astute posters above...

[EzInKy]

...for pointing out that I yet again have made a typo. Yes, of course I meant '02, not `92. It's an age thing. After you live through enough of them, the decades just seem to start running together.

Boring article

[bcmm]

Gentoo doesn't have core versions, just versions of each package. This is a new version of the installer, one of the least frequently used bits of Gentoo. Apart from the few prebuilt packages in the version for people without internet, this will produce the same system as any other Gentoo installer.

Please stop reporting new installer versions! This is uninteresting to those who don't use Gentoo becasue it doesn't effect them, and uninteresting to users because they have installed it already.

Re:Gnome 2.10?

[commodoresloat]

Are you saying that gentoo is Slack-ing off?

Re:Fresh gentoo, old debian

[Rushuru]

Anyone who uses Sid and a handful of unofficial repositories will be almost as current as Gentoo "~arch".

However, using unofficial repositories is not as painless as it might look.
*The repository might go offline any time
*The repository might not recompile their packages for a new library in the official repository, making it useless
*The repository probably didn't spend as much time packaging the software as they should have, which can lead to at least 2 things:
- Ugly stuff like debs who installs themselves in /usr/local (I've seen that on several occasions)
- Very painful upgrades when the software from the unofficial repository eventually reaches main (mostly dependencies).

With gentoo I never had such problems with masked packages and unofficial ebuilds. Which doesn't mean that debian sid doesn't have other advantages.

Proposal for etc-update solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Many Gentoo users have probably run etc-update only to find out that 85 files need updating, 7 have been automatically merged, now you have to merge the rest yourself. After working steadily through them, you soon discover that 95% of them are files you have not even heard of, or at least you have never changed them. After a while you decide to just run your eyes over the list quickly, and keep the ones you have edited, then use -5 on the rest. Except you miss one and now your system doesn't work and you have to figure out why.

Here is my idea for a way to solve the problem.

Gentoo should always keep a backup copy of the original configuration files. When you run etc-update it should compare the current file with the backup copy and if they are identical the current file should be deleted and replaced by the new file without prompting the user. Then the list will only be the 5 or 6 files that you have actually changed, and there is much less chance of a user accidentally overwriting their own changes.

Of course the old functionality should still be available too, for those that prefer it.

Comments?

Mark Byers.

Re:Proposal for etc-update solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Try using dispatch-conf instead of etc-update. This does exactly what you're suggesting.

Re:honest question

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a current OS X user and I have recently come into an older PIII box.

Thanks for the mental image..

Re:Gentoo and upgrades

[tomstdenis]

Not only that but xorg reads xfree config files and they behave [in that respect] pretty much the same.

Not only that but I've come back from a month abroad and had no trouble updating a gentoo box.

Maybe if the person neglected the box for a couple years there would be deprecated packages but at that point you're probably better off... that's how all these worms/viruses spread anyways...

Ideally Gentoo should have an installer and ideally it should have a "put emerge in my crontab please" mode for the newbs that don't want to toy with it.

But really, to use gentoo you're gonna need to know how to use emerge/etc-update and a couple other tools.

Oh for shame, a free OS that works well, is reliable and decently supported and all you have todo is burn a 50MB CD to start and read a manual!!!

WE'RE ASKING TOO MUCH!!!

Tom

Re:question,

[tomstdenis]

A small gentoo desktop install typically takes between 1 and 2GB. That includes the coreutils, linuxutils, X, mozilla, editors, compilers, etc...

As for the ram, ideally you want 256 as a minimum or you're going to be swapping a lot to disk. 512MB is plenty. I know on my laptop at least going from 256 to 768 [two slots, it came with a 256MB board] MB of ram was a nice boost for building stuff.

On my laptop I sit at 3.2GB used and I have tons of other tools installed [Gnome, tetex, debugging tools, gaim, openoffice, etc...].

But even a full desktop build with Gnome or KDE wouldn't top 4GB of space and in that you're getting a lot of free tools.

Tom

Re:question,

[MeerCat]

can it be installed on a PIII with 256mb ram and an 8gb hdd?

I'm running gentoo on an old 233 pentium MMX laptop with 80Mb RAM and a 6Gg hard disk (of which 1.5 gb is stil an old windows partition) - it's my home server including my main mail server (built in UPS, only draws about 10 watts, small and quite quiet etc.) and it's running fine.

I rarely run up X on it, I admit, but I've got X installed (so if need be I can run up apps to display on my main machine) and it's happily running qmail (qpsmtpd,spamassassin, clamav,pyzor, razor,dcc etc.), ssh and other "home server" apps, and it doesn't need much room:


Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6 2.9G 1.8G 1019M 64% /
/dev/hda5 17M 8.7M 7.5M 54% /boot
/dev/hda7 1.1G 560M 529M 52% /usr/portage



I could probably trim this further, but it's fine for me. I have a weekly cron job to "emerge --sync" and "emerge -Dupv world", and I'm thinking of adding "emerge -Du --fetch-only world".
Updates compile a little slowly at times, but then I don't have much installed to update, and I could always add a cron job to do the updates too.

Warning to AMD64 Users - Don't download yet!

[isolationism]

Users wishing to take the plunge and install Gentoo on an AMD64 should wait a day or three before attempting to download an image from the mirror. As described in the thread on the Gentoo Forums, the wrong image has been propagated by accident.

Gentoo's master mirror was staged with the wrong amd64 livecds which don't boot due to a missing bootsector!

We're currently shipping the correct images to all the mirrors.

Not that this will probably impact any /. readers, but I read the AMD64 forums religiously as I have two AMD64 Gentoo installations at my house. I don't go reading the forums before installing though, so hopefully this saves at least one person some time/frustration before installing.

Re:Gentoo and upgrades

[MarcQuadra]

m I going to have to rebuild my entire base system manually because I waited too long between syncs?

No. The message that your configuration isn't valid anymore isn't a death-knell. Change the symlink of /etc/make.profile to a newer target and emerge -u world.

With a system that old, I'd do an emerge -e world too, to recompile the whole system with your new compiler.

Re:Will it actually compile this time?

[flithm]

Yes it compiles for amd64. Also your video card has absolutely nothing to do with compilation! The only thing that your video card affects is the X server (and to some degree frame buffer console mode)... which is your fault for buying ATI (known for notoriously bad Linux support).

Support a company that cares about Linux: NVidia.

Having said that... many people with ATI cards have Linux running properly (with 3D support). I've heard they've been improving their driver steadily.

The "Installer" Isn't Just For Installing Gentoo

[grubber33]

As you all know, Gentoo releases are just pre-compiled packages with on a live CD with an environment for you to work your way around in. This also comes in handy for rescuing any Linux installation, as I've done many times before. If you mess up your kernel config or your FS crashes and you can't acces *.fsck, you can always do it from the live CD. Just a note for those that have had horrid experiences with getting back into their desktops after upgrades.

Never ceases to amaze me...

[MerlinTheWizard]

how Gentoo generates heat and passion. If you don't like it, don't use it, period. Why waste outrageous amount of times explaining to the world that it's stupid and that its users are insane? In the time it took you guys who posted that kind of comments, you could have emerge'd and updated a Gentoo box. ;-)

Re:What is the big deal about compilation?

[DeathPenguin]

>>Why is everyone forgetting that NOTHING is stopping you from installing an RPM. Just "inject" that version number of your installed RPM into Portage and it knows you have it. Nothing is stopping you from installing something manually, without using portage.

I personally like to build my own kernels from scratch without the patches the Gentoo-ized kernels include. To do this I would "inject" as you suggested. Injecting a package is obsolete now, and you should instead place the package name in /etc/portage/profile/packages.provided or some such (I'm not on my Gentoo box now).

I also had a similar experience with RPMs and breaking things. Most distros seem to have that straightened out these days, but RPM hell was still a huge problem back when I switched to Gentoo. Gentoo's Portage generally takes care of things like dependencies exceptionally well. USE flags are also handy for compiling things like MPlayer.

Um, not insightful: Wrong.

[oldosadmin]

This is a new *profile* version. Profile versions change things. Like default packages (one of the 2004 releases changed "x-window-system" to be xorg-x11 by default, for example).

New profiles mean more than just installers.

Gentoo p.u.

[zixor]

My most memorable experience with Gentoo was leaving my Duron 800 (with MSI motherboard) compiling the latest greatest Mozilla over a weekend in the heat of summer (29+ celsius outside, with AC turned off by building maintenance during weekends) and having the mobo's capacitors blow and spew their gooey liquid centers all over. Luckily the drive survived. and my use flags were so vague about architectures that sticking the drive in a P3-600 worked just fine. Still, it kinda put me off the "compile every damned app and the kitchen sink" mentality for good ...